This month marks 25 years since the devastating murder by Bradley Murdoch of British backpacker Peter Falconio, 28, and the attempted abduction of his girlfriend, Joanne Lees, then 27.
Erica Gibson was the shift sergeant at the Alice Springs Police Station in the early hours of July 15, 2001, when a strange call came in.
A truck driver reported that a woman had been abducted on the Northern Territory’s Stuart Highway, and her boyfriend was missing.
“We normally got dispatched to general disturbances, drunk people, traffic offences,” Erica tells Woman’s Day. “So this information was remarkable.”
What happened next would shock the world and the case would become known as one of Australia’s most infamous and shocking crimes.
ROAD TRIP ADVENTURE
At the time of the murder, Erica, 35, was a sergeant in the NT Police. When a truck driver made the emergency call at around 1.30am, he reported Joanne had waved down him and his driving partner on the highway.
They took the distraught woman to the nearby Barrow Creek Hotel, 300 kilometres north of Alice Springs.
The hotel owner, Les Pilton, saw Joanne in the truck in a “foetal position”. He and the truck drivers had to coax her out of the vehicle.
“She was cowering away from the world,” Les later said.
As a bed was made available to the English woman, Erica and the station watch commander made the three-hour drive to the remote hotel, aware an armed offender was potentially on the loose.
“We made that decision bearing in mind the offender could be driving straight at us on the highway, and we weren’t in an armoured car, just a Holden Commodore,” remembers Erica.
“These days, the response would be very different.”
RED DIRT
Erica found Joanne waiting at the bar. She had been on a working holiday with Peter, living in Sydney, before the pair bought an old VW Kombi for a road trip adventure.
“She was wide-eyed, and had red dirt on her,” Erica recalls. “She wasn’t overly emotional, more like a deer in the headlights. She was relieved someone was speaking to her.”
Erica interviewed Joanne in Les’s office and was given access to the hotel manager’s computer to take notes.
As Erica learnt, Joanne said that she and Peter – both from West Yorkshire – were on a working holiday visa and had been living in Sydney. In June, they bought an old orange VW Kombi and travelled to Melbourne and Adelaide before heading north for the red centre, in what Joanne described as a “young and carefree” adventure.
The couple, who had been together for around five years at that point, had left Alice Springs the previous afternoon, heading north on the Stuart Highway.
HEART-STOPPING ESCAPE
At around 7.30pm, “a vehicle behind them flashed their lights,” she recalls.
A man with a drooping moustache in a white Toyota Landcruiser ute drove up alongside them, pointing at their car, as if something was wrong.
“So they pulled over,” says Erica. “Peter got out of the car, went to the back with the man to have a look. And that’s the last time Joanne saw Peter.”
Joanne said she heard a bang but at the time, she was in the driver’s seat revving the engine as the men inspected the exhaust pipe, so she thought the car had backfired. Then the man appeared at her window holding a handgun. It was at that horrifying moment she realised her boyfriend may have been shot.
The man used homemade cable-tie handcuffs to bind Joanne’s hands, then forced the terrified woman into the canopy-covered tray of his ute, which she said held “some kind of bed”.
Joanne asked the man if he was going to rape her. “He just told me to shut up,” she said later in a media interview.
When the man left her unattended, she embarked on a heart-stopping escape from the back of the ute, hiding behind a spinifex shrub in the bush. She concealed herself for hours as the man used a torch to search for her with his Dalmatian-cross dog.
He eventually took off in the Kombi, before returning on foot and then left for good in his own vehicle.
That man was WA mechanic and drug dealer, Murdoch, 47.
“Then she saw the headlights of a truck coming along and ran out onto the highway,” says Erica who can still remember how Lees had only one thing on her mind during the interview.
“She wanted to know if Peter had been found,” she says.
In a frustrating moment for all, a power surge at the remote hotel caused Erica to lose the document holding all the notes of her nearly three-hour interview with Joanne. She had to conduct the entire interview again.
“It just added to Joanne’s trauma,” says Erica. “But her story was consistent.”
After the interview, Erica travelled with Joanne in the police car back to Alice Springs, for a medical assessment.
“She was absolutely exhausted, and still asking where Peter was,” Erica recalls.
Later that day, police found his blood at the crime scene and the Kombi was located in bushland nearby. But there was no sign of Peter anywhere.
INTENSE SCRUTINY
Joanne was taken to a hotel in Alice Springs, and Erica stayed with her. “She was in deep shock,” says Erica.
Yet her ordeal was far from over. As the horrific story swept the globe and the world’s media descended on Alice Springs, some began questioning Joanne’s lack of emotion. It also later emerged that she had had a brief affair with a friend in Sydney and she was criticised for wearing a “Cheeky Monkey” T-shirt at her first public appeal for information
“Joanne endured intense scrutiny,” says Erica. “But Lindy Chamberlain wasn’t hysterical, either. I’ve responded to a number of women who have been beaten and traumatised – none of them behaved the same way”
Many people simply didn’t believe Joanne’s incredible story and her animosity toward the media fueled theories that she was somehow involved in her boyfriend’s death. Others speculated that her story was all part of an insurance scam, and Peter had faked his own death.
British journalist Martin Bashir – famous for his Princess Diana interview – asked her in a paid TV interview in 2002 if she had killed Peter. She laughed before answering, “No.”
He asked, if her hands were tied behind her back, how did Joanne manage to physically wave down the truck driver? And why did police only find her footprints in the sand, not the footprints of Peter or the killer?
OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE
In the programme, she clarified that while she was in her hiding spot, she had maneuvered her bound hands around her feet, to her front. And she explained that her footprints were only found in her hiding place – the rest of the area was a type of gravel or leafy surface that held no footprints.
“If Pete was here, he’d be just so mad at the treatment that I’ve had,” she said.
In the end, the overwhelming evidence supported her. After a tip-off from one of Murdoch’s mates, the drug runner became a prime suspect.
The mate had seen Murdoch making homemade handcuffs, and Murdoch had questioned him about where to bury a body.
He’d also changed his appearance after July 14, shaving off his moustache and cutting his hair. He also drastically altered his vehicle, extending the tray and putting on a new canopy.
When the killer was arrested over another crime, his DNA was taken and was matched to Joanne’s T-shirt, the Kombi gearstick and the handcuffs. Joanne’s hair tie was also found wrapped around Murdoch’s gun holster – “a trophy,” lead detective Colleen Gwynne later said.
A jury took eight hours to convict him.
Joanne called the verdict “a relief”.
“Because for a long time I felt that moment would never happen,” she told 60 Minutes in 2017.
“He’s no longer free to harm other people.”
NEVER AT PEACE
On the courthouse steps after the trial, in which Murdoch was sentenced to a minimum 28-year term, Joanne read a statement, flanked by Peter’s family.
“To see justice done today, eases a great burden for us all,” she said. “This will enable us to take another step in the grieving process for Pete.”
Today, Joanne is a social worker at a council in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. She has returned to Australia several times over the years and during one visit was reunited with her half-sister. But her life has been, unsurprisingly, forever marked by what she went through.
“Pete lost his life that night, but I lost mine too,” she said in 2017. “I’ll never be fully at peace if Pete’s not found.”
“But even now we still hold out hope that his remains will be found.”
Peter’s parents live a few kilometres away and have not given up on one day laying their boy to rest. At the time of Murdoch’s death from throat cancer in 2025, the couple made a 20-minute video to be played to him by the police, in which they pleaded for him to give them the answers they so desperately needed.
Murdoch refused to watch it, demanding police leave his hospital room.
“We were hoping [Murdoch] would reveal where Peter was before he died,” said Joan Falconio, 80, in June.
“Peter was a wonderful son, he was kind to everyone,” she added.
“It’s awful for me and my husband not to have him in our lives.”
Erica, now a senior sergeant, has spent the last 37 years providing frontline service in the NT. Last year she won the Fitzgeralds Justice Individual Award for her trusted and compassionate service in remote NT communities, supporting Aboriginal women. She has never forgotten Peter and Joanne.
“It was one of the most significant cases of my career,” says Erica. “I still feel for Joanne.”
A reward of up to $500,000 is available to anyone providing information that leads to the discovery of Peter Falconio’s remains. If you have information, call CrimeStoppers on 1800 333 000 or visit crimestoppersnt.com.au.
